Video Review: The Cult: Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum

I'm in the process of refining my subject matter for writing very seriously. in the last six months, blog posts I've written have gotten somewhere around 5,000 hits, but close to a thousand of those hits were for two different posts. The answer to what they were completely blows my mind. The one got the most hits was a review of the single "Satanic Royalty" by Midnight for Jerry Magoo. I couldn't believe that, a.) it was someone else's idea and b.) I found it to be a relatively mediocre track. The other blog post that got a whole lot of hits was a review of the films Inseminoid and Humanoids from the Deep for my "solo" blog. That's even worse. I don't necessarily even consider those mediocre films, they're probably really actually poor films if I think about it for long. Hey, if that's what people like, inseminoid and "Satanic Royalty" by Midnight, that's the kind of thing I'll write about. Personally, I like the metal bands and the goth type bands, I like the horror films. Of course, I consider myself more than just someone who watches horror flicks and listens to metal and goth bands. That being the case, I may as well speak openly on my opinion on such things. I will here explore an example within the general topic of goth and metal music of the 80's, which I addressed in my review of "Satanic Royalty". If I had to rate my five favorite albums, they'd be about as follows 1. Joy Division: Closer 2. Voivod: War and Pain 3. The Cult: Love 4.The Cult:Dreamtime 5. Various Artists: In Goth Daze (goth compilation from Cleopatra Records) Those are albums I've known about for years and years and keep coming back to. If some young people interested in starting a new band approached me, I'd tell them to listen to those albums very, very closely. You'll notice that not one, but two early albums by The Cult appear on this list. The Cult began as a goth band under the names Southern Death Cult and Death Cult with vocalist Ian Astbury and ended the 80's as more or less an LA style hair metal band. Dreamtime and Love, their first and second album, are situated in a transitional period between those two polarities of sound. It's a distinctive sound. It's also a sound which a band would truly have to be able to play to create. The Cult was able to get away with it. They were able to get away with a lot- the singer Ian Astbury had a lyrical obsession with Native Americans and even tried desperately to look like one, but was in fact, British, though he was exposed to Native American culture by living near a Reservation outside of Montreal as a child. The other thing is that especially on the second of those albums, Love, they made musical and lyrical allusions to the 60's hippie movement, but the band members were about ten years to young to have had any direct involvement in it. A lot of early Cult has resurfaced in recent years. The above clip is from a live VHS called Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum from 1984. Footage from Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum ended up reincarnated on YouTube. The title is slightly misleading, many of the tracks on this release are not from the album Dreamtime, but are from when the band was known as Death Cult or Southern Death Cult. If you think back on the last decade of rock and roll, if you think back on Modest Mouse and The Strokes selling a whole lot of records, and then listen back on the tracks from Dreamtime, it's shameful what has come to the fore. The Cult at that point had both so much energy and so much sophistication. The future that they envisioned at that point unfortunately has become a future of the past by now. I'm no hippie, my politics are fringe right if anything. I don't use drugs at this point. From a musical perspective, from a perspective simply of sound, the first two cult albums, and to some extent the material recorded as Southern Death Cult or Death Cult, I think the Cult really had it at that point.